It might seem laughable, even absurd, that the guitar world’s failure to appreciate the original Les Paul would lead to its deletion from the Gibson line up after 1960, but so it often goes with creations that are so far ahead of their time. Just a few years later, scores of groundbreaking artists would discover the incomparable power of this instrument, and its premature scarcity would also make it an extremely valuable guitar while the model was really still just a toddler, thus rendering it the first collectible “vintage” electric guitar.

Fast forward 50 years, and the Les Paul of 1958-’60 has become the most prized electric guitar on the planet. But to say “the” Les Paul is actually somewhat misleading: while all of the fewer than 2,000 Les Pauls manufactured in this brief three-year timeframe are exceedingly desirable, they were often quite different guitars, too, varying not only from year to year as the model’s specs evolved, but varying even within the same year of manufacture.

None embodies this “work in progress” so completely as the final issue of the line, the 1960 Les Paul Standard—or, should we say “Standards”—now brought back to life in the Custom Shop 50th Anniversary 1960 Les Paul Standards. To accurately present the variations in specifications and finish that original examples from 1960 exhibit, Gibson’s Custom Shop is creating this limited Anniversary model in three versions, each of which embodies in period-correct detail the final three steps along the journey before this hallowed electric guitar was pulled from production.